Re: Create email tracking image

There are many problems with those so called tracking bugs First of all, most email clients won't load remote content unless told to do so by the user (which is a per-message thing). Basically, you are 20 years too late.

Secondly, spam filters look out for exactly those things and are very likely to flag your message as spam when they detect a remotely loaded 1 pixel image. In the course of mail processing and spam filtering, the mail system may already load the image (either for checking or for embedding in the message).

Last but not least: Tracking bugs probably violate various privacy laws all around the world. The EU has the GDPR, and the UK has replaced that (after Brexit) with it's own version "UK-GDPR" (pretty much a word-for-word copy AFAIK). As you stated, you want to track user behaviour. This requires explicit consent by the end user!

A GDPR violation can get expensive. I am not a lawyer, but this is what i can see:

A user can state non-material damages (suffered stress due to your privacy violation or something similar) and claim compensation. GDPR Article 82 subsection 1:

Any person who has suffered material or non-material damage as a resul
+t 
of an infringement of this Regulation shall have the right to receive 
compensation from the controller or processor for the damage suffered.
[download]

Tracking a user seems to (at least) violate the spirit of Article 25 "Data protection by design and default" of the GDPR, since there is no technical requirement to track the delivery of an email and no reasonable user expectation that the reading status of emails are tracked. Also, you need the other infrastructure in place to deal with data protection and handling of user requests pertaining to the GDPR (deletion requests, information requests, etc).

Violating GDPR can result in administrative fines, see Article 83 subsection 4:

Infringements of the following provisions shall, in accordance with pa
+ragraph 2, 
be subject to administrative fines up to 10 000 000 EUR, or in the cas
+e of an 
undertaking, up to 2 % of the total worldwide annual turnover of the p
+receding
financial year, whichever is higher:

(a) the obligations of the controller and the processor pursuant to Ar
+ticles 8, 11, 25 to 39 and 42 and 43;

(b) the obligations of the certification body pursuant to Articles 42 
+and 43;

(c) the obligations of the monitoring body pursuant to Article 41(4).
[download]

So technically, you could possibly get fined 10 million Euros (or more, depending on the financial success of your company) for adding a tracking mechanism to your outgoing email. Ooof, that doesn't sound like a project worth pursuing.

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Comment on Re: Create email tracking image Select or Download Code

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Re^2: Create email tracking image by LanX (Saint) on Mar 20, 2023 at 16:50 UTC
I seems to me it's a grey zone because too many of the big players are still profiting from user profiling. I just stumbled over a duckduckgo mail forwarding service promising to cleanse emails from tracking stuff. Apparently is (inter)national legislation not (yet) doing enough to force providers to automatically do so. Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the 𐍀𐌴𐍂𐌻 Programming Language :) Wikisyntax for the Monastery}	[reply]
Re^3: Create email tracking image by cavac (Parson) on Mar 20, 2023 at 17:06 UTC
I seems to me it's a grey zone because too many of the big players are still profiting from user profiling. Possibly. But it's one of those grey zones that are probably stricter for small companies than they are for bigger ones. Microsoft and Google can easily throw a few million bucks in the direction of their lawyers to make such problems magically go away (and earn those millions back in a matter of hours). I somehow doubt that Bod has the same options... PerlMonks XP is useless? Not anymore: XPD - Do more with your PerlMonks XP	[reply]
Re^4: Create email tracking image by LanX (Saint) on Mar 20, 2023 at 23:40 UTC
my point - admittedly badly expressed - is that the mail providers are the first to blame if they don't protect their users better, and laws should be stricter here. Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the 𐍀𐌴𐍂𐌻 Programming Language :) Wikisyntax for the Monastery}	[reply]
Re^2: Create email tracking image by Bod (Parson) on Mar 21, 2023 at 22:45 UTC
Basically, you are 20 years too late I know of no CRM or mail software that uses any other method... For example, we use Send In Blue for some transactional emails and use their email tracking. They add something like this to their emails: `<img width="1" height="1" src="https://fgfcgfj.r.af.d.sendibt2.com/tr/ +op/ubVEi9KMORTJR7DtkZjC4DjoU--GFjX4L8Ive0tmrRHobDcJWwFSnv4PdLwO4VRiZ1 +6P1arvc-oAwLKIFN_U8zi7OcP99UZXHA7bwdO0_yAM3yvQPuk3ocgXu2pOprxjHTynTTj +cPblGap6rVGNweeM1Wro2dAoIK-xRqlhhQGGGN8" alt="" />` [download] (tracking code changed) Having a user click on a link is a more precise trigger of action as users and mail software can affect opening data but we still need to know who has definitely opened an email to be able to personalise relevant content. The data we collect in email processing is not personal data as defined by GDPR and our data processing systems are registered with the Information Commissioners Office as required here in the UK.	[reply] [d/l]


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